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Grantees of offices, commissions and pardons
(1413-1416)The Patent Rolls are the Chancery enrolments of royal letters patent. Those for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd years of the reign of king Henry V (21 March 1413 to 20 March 1416) were edited for the Public Record Office by R. C. Fowler, and published in 1910. The main contents are royal commissions and grants; ratifications of ecclesiastical estates; writs of aid to royal servants and purveyors; and pardons. The commissions of the peace issued for the English towns and counties and entered on the rolls, being largely repetitive, have been consolidated in a single appendix.

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Suffolk Charters
(1500-1509)A large accumulation of documents preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, formerly constituted the antiquarian collections of Anthony a Wood, Roger Dodsworth, Ralph Thoresby, Thomas Martin of Palgrave, Thomas Tanner bishop of St Asaph, Dr Richard Rawlinson, Richard Furney archdeacon of Surrey, and Richard Gough. A calendar of these was prepared by William H. Turner and published in 1878 under the title 'Calendar of Charters and Rolls preserved in the Bodleian Library'. The word 'charters' is here used in a rather loose sense, including virtually any manuscript or copy of a manuscript, but the bulk of the contents consists of mediaeval deeds of conveyance. Turner's calendar deals with each briefly, naming the principal parties and the nature of the deed, but hardly ever lists the witnesses. Many of these charters were undated (dating of deeds did not become general until around 1350) or so damaged or defective ('mutilated' is Turner's usual description) as no longer to display a legible date. However, he contrived, from the style of the script and/or the nature of the contents, to estimate dates in such cases. The sample scan is from the start of the Bedfordshire list.

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Inhabitants of Suffolk
(1568)By Act of Parliament of December 1566 a subsidy of 8d in the £ on moveable goods and 4s in the £ on the annual value of land was raised from the lay (as opposed to clergy) population. These are the returns for Suffolk, printed in 1909 in the Suffolk Green Book series.

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Middlesex Sessions
(1549-1603)This printed calendar collates a number of surviving records from Middlesex sessions for the period. Principally these are the Gaol Delivery Rolls (G. D. R.) and the General Sessions of the Peace Rolls (G. S. O. P. R.). Both series cover general criminal indictments (bills) together with the recognizances of the witnesses to attend; but the Gaol Delivery Rolls, by their very nature, tend to deal with the more serious cases - felonies where the accused could not be released on bail. The General Sessions rolls also include the sheriff's lists of bailiffs, sub-bailiffs, high and petty constables in the shire; writs of venire facias for production of jurors, writs of capias, lists of jurors, jury-panels &c. The Gaol Delivery Rolls also include coroners' inquests, writs of supersedeas, and memoranda of proclamations. Special inquiries are recorded in separate Sessions of Oyer and Terminer (S. O. T.) rolls and Inquest or Inquisition rolls (I. R.) Although coverage is good, none of the sequences of rolls for this period is complete. A peculiarity of this calendar is that in the case of actual incidents, the date given at the start of each entry is the date that the incident was alleged to have taken place (for instance, 1 June 11 Elizabeth (1569) in the sample scan) rather than the date of the court proceedings.

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Bury St Edmunds area testators and legatees
(1370-1650)A number of wills proved and registered in the courts of Bury St Edmunds Commisary and Sudbury Archdeaconry were selected by Samuel Tymms 'more with a view to illustrate the peculiar customs and language of the period than the topology or genealogy of the district' and transcribed for publication by the Camden Society in 1850. Most of those after 1450 are in English.

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Hertfordshire Sessions
(1619-1657)Incidents from the Hertfordshire Sessions Books and Sessions Minute Books. These cover a wide range of criminal and civil business for the county.

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Prerogative Court of Canterbury Wills: Norfolk: Strays
(1658)William Brigg compiled abstracts of all the wills in Register "Wootton" of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. The abstracts of those proved in 1658 were published by him in 1894. The court's main jurisdiction was central and southern England and Wales, as well as over sailors &c dying abroad. We have re-indexed the whole volume, county by county, for both testators and strays (legatees, witnesses and other persons mentioned in the abstracts).

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Colonists and adventurers
(1610-1660)During this period, the English crown issued charters to companies of adventurers and individual proprietors to establish settlements in Acadia (Nova Scotia), Africa, Amazon, Anguilla, Antigua, Association (Tortuga), Bahamas, Barbadoes, Barbuda, Bermudas (Somers Islands), Canada, Cape Gratia de Dios, Carolina, Bay of Darien, Delaware Bay, Deseada, Dominica, Eleuthera, Enegada, Fernando de Noronho, Floria, Fonseca, Grenada, Guadaloupe, Guiana, Guinea, Henrietta, Jamaica, Long Island, Maine, Marigalante, Maryland, Metalina, Montserrat, Narrangansetts Bay, Nevis, New England (New Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Haven), Newfoundland, New Hampshire, New York, Nova Scotia, Providence Island, Quebec, Redendo, Rhode Island, St Bartholomew, St Brandon, St Christopher's, St Eustache, St Lucia, St Martin, St Vincent, Sembrera, Surinam, Tadousac, Tobago, Todosantes, Trinidad and Virginia. The central archive relating to these ventures up to 1688 amounted to 71 volumes of correspondence, plus 109 entry books containing entries of letters sent to the colonies, of charters, commissions and instructions, minutes and proceedings of the companies and proprietaries that in the first instance governed several of the colonies, journals of the Board of Trade, &c. This archive, called the State Papers, Colonial Series, at the Public Record Office, was calendared for the period through to 1660 by W. Noel Sainsbury, and published in 1860. The first few pages include material as early as 1574, but the bulk of the volume is from 1610 to 1660, and that is indexed here.

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London Marriage Allegations
(1611-1660)London, Essex and part of Hertfordshire lay within the diocese of London. In the later 17th century the individual archdeaconry courts issued marriage licences, but for this period the only surviving material is from the overarching London Consistory court. The main series of marriage allegations from the consistory court was extracted by Colonel Joseph Lemuel Chester, and the text was edited by George J. Armytage and published by the Harleian Society in 1887. A typical later entry will give date; name, address and occupation of groom; name, address and condition of his intended bride, and/or, where she is a spinster, her father's name, address and occupation. Lastly we have the name of the church where the wedding was going to take place. For the later years Colonel Chester merely picked out items that he thought were of interest, and his selections continue as late as 1828, but the bulk of the licences abstracted here are from the 17th century.